By Light Reading
Publication Date: 2026-05-14 11:09:00
Cisco has just become the latest company to link planned job cuts to AI, sparking the usual fears about a robot takeover and mass unemployment. Either the machines eventually kill us, and Skynet replaces homo sapiens as Earth’s dominant species, or the machines pamper us like overindulged pets, and we evolve into the docile blobs of WALL-E. Pick your dystopia – 1984 or Brave New World. Neither sounds ideal, but that has not stayed the executioner’s hand. In a blog accompanying Cisco’s latest results, CEO Chuck Robbins said 4,000 jobs will be cut by the end of July as investment shifts into AI.
When the slaughter is over and the smoke lifts, Cisco would have about 82,200 employees, judging by the figure it gave for headcount last July in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). That seems unlikely to have changed significantly since then, with Robbins reckoning planned cuts represent “less than 5% of our total employee base.”
Talking about layoffs and AI in the…
